Thetford

Crazy Golf Gas Rig

Memoire Hotel

Unused/unissued 1974 material from the British Pathé news website.
[Click image - video opens in new window].

Tower Dance Club

Apparently soon to be converted into a boxing club, the Tower Dancing Club on Riverside Road in Gorleston on Sea, Norfolk, stands as possibly the most implausibly sited dance club ever, situated among industrial workshops and overlooking the business end of the River Yare just as it reaches the North Sea.

Luckily, recent plans to develop Riverside Road seem to have come to nothing (see this site for comments on the proposed development) and the Friends of Riverside Road appear to be doing a good job sticking up for the area. Other structures like the 'dolphin' jetties and the lifeboat house might have more heritage appeal but an abandoned postwar dance club lost among the welding yards is a ready made winner.

Newcastle Central Library

Almost secret entrance

© Copyright Mark Smiles and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Demolition video already posted here.

OK, it was hardly glamorous but once the thrill of large open interior space wears off, the new building feels like a cross between a duty free outlet and a sixth form center, but with more noise. Every effort has been made to disguise the fact that this is a library.

Birmingham City Library

John Madin's remarkable 1974 Birmingham Central Library is set to be demolished. A new glittery library is on offer, but where's the improvement? Not sure what the move to replace a flak tower with a tissue box tells us about contemporary urban space.

• Paul Dale, 'End in sight for Birmingham Library after Government refuses listed status,' Birmingham Post, Nov 23 2009.
• English Heritage response, Nov 23 2009.
• Promotional site for the proposed new Library of Birmingham, including interviews with children speaking as if, without the new library, there will be no books in the city for them to read.

Andrew Freeman

(Manzanar) Architectural Double.

The buildings at the Japanese American WWII internment camp at Manzanar were relocated and reused after the war, effectively dismantling the material evidence of the camp's existence. Between 2001 and 2004 Andrew Freeman tracked the buildings down and photographed them.

#11.4.01 - Mount Whitney Rifle Club, Lone Pine, California.

N 36°36.156’, W118°03.749’

Rod Dickson

The Milgram Reenactment (2002)



Historical Reenactment from Critical Spatial Practice

Straight Up and Down

Cabinet Magazine 11 2003

Fiona Banner, Tate Britain Duveens Commission 2010

Working the Line

Good information and images on this project and related things here:

• The 98th Parallel at a456.
• Working the Line at BLDGBLOG
• GeoCaching the Mexican Border Obelisk Monuments at Groundspeak Forums
• David Taylor's Working the Line at Fraction Magazine

Hartmut Bitomsky

High-Ballin (1978)

Featuring Peter Fonda and Jerry Reed, we're not at the bottom of the 1978 truckin' barrel yet.

Steel Cowboy (1978)

There is seemingly no end to these trucking films. Another one from 1978, this time with James Brolin and Rip Torn.

Charles Olson

See Amy Cutler's Write of the Map blog for some excellent poetry/map material.

The Ethics of Dust

Series of installations by Jorge Otero-Pailos undertaken to conserve pollution.

• Jorge Otero-Pailos website
• Interview with Otero-Pailos
• Another interview

Mark Tansey

Action Painting II

Purity Test

Coastline Measure (1987)

Gateshead Trinity Square Car Park

Thompson of Prudhoe have got the job of demolishing this beast.

Thompson promise time-lapse footage of the demolition. The video of the Newcastle library demolition can be seen here. The new library is shiny but the old one was resplendently 'fuck off.' As Owen Hatherley points out in The Guardian, the car park is making way for a Tesco store with student flats on top. There's a form of beligerence in that, too, but it's nowhere near as bracing as stacked concrete parking spaces.

John Madin

BBC documentary on the Birmingham Brutalist from 1965.

White Lightnin

Tom Wolfe, 'The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!' Esquire (March 1965).

Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow

Infinity Cyc

D.A. Pennebaker

Pennebaker's Daybreak Express (1953)

• Short Senses of Cinema article on the film here.
• Pennebaker Hegedus Films website.

Jay Leyda

A Bronx Morning - Jay Leyda (1931)
Uploaded by Iconographe. - Discover more animation and arts videos.

New Topographics Photographs on Google Maps

This map geographically locates the locations of many of the photographs from the New Topographics exhibition. So if you ever wondered where that Robert Adams tract house was in Westminster, Colorado, now you can find out.

Robert Adams, Tract House, Westminster, Colorado (1974).

Gelatin silver print 15.2 x 19.6 cm. George Eastman House Collection.

Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001)

Wrecked piers, empty swimming pools, drought, gangs of street kids, it's all here.

'Curiously, the house we moved to had a drained swimming pool in its garden. It must have been the first drained pool I had seen, and it struck me as strangely significant in a way I have never fully grasped. My parents decided not to fill the pool, and it lay in the garden like a mysterious empty presence. I would walk through the unmown grass and stare down at its canted floor.'

--J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008).

Clearly what Ballard needed was a board.

• Good pool skating stuff at Blue Tile Obsession.
• Also see Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (Berg, 2001).

Walter De Maria, Mile Long Drawing (1968)

White Line Fever (1975)

Not really in the same league as Road Movie but part of the oil crisis/70s recession-era obsession with instigating the automobile's integral accident -- this time with trucks. The big year for trucker movies was 1978, with Peckinpah's Convoy and Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way But Loose exploiting the exploitation movies. But White Line Fever, with Jan-Michael Vincent and Slim Pickens, is more pissed off and therefore gets my vote.

Road Movie (1974)

Forget Moonfire, for real existential truck action Joseph Strick's Road Movie is the only real choice. Strick did some great work on The Savage Eye (1959) but spent years making films that attempted to adapt the unadaptable -- Joyce, Genet, Henry Miller. Road Movie is much better: raw, awkward and alienating.

Moonfire (1973)

The most authentic trucking movie ever made? Who would know?
The whole film is available on Youtube here.

Helen Levitt